Month: April 2010

Going Green

It’s always healthy to have hobbies outside of technology.  My day job is being an Exchange Administrator but during my off time I like to read news and tool around with Linux.  Recently though, I’ve made life changes to reduce my carbon footprint as well as to make my life healthier in many ways.  These changes were initiated by my wife and have spread to myself and my son and even to our immediate family.  Healthy eating and going green is a lifestyle, albeit, one that is not for everyone.  Just the same, I’ve begun to chronicle my attempts at ‘going green’ at a new website called if it’s green.  I’ll be investigating green technology at this blog along with topics like composting, gardening, solar power, generators, and green computing.  If you’d like to check it out, please do…the most recent article is about Corky, a wireless mouse that doesn’t require batteries.

Thanks for reading!

Security Group Membership without Powershell

I’m getting pretty used to powershell in my day to day workings with Exchange.  Today however, I was helping a user out on a PC in a different department and I needed to find all of the members of a specific security group.  Sure, I could remote back into my work PC and launch ADUC but I’d rather be able to query it with a single query…all from right there using her computer with the limited user account.

Thanks to powershell, I now think in pipes…while I’ve always done this with Linux, I’ve never had to do so with Windows.  It’s almost like wearing two caps at the same time.  Nonetheless, I was able to figure out how to do this after 3 or 4 attempts and then output it to a file so I could see members of the security group and I did so without the power of powershell (ba-dum-ching!)

I used dsquery and piped the command using dsget to grab the information I needed and then output that into a text file onto the desktop.  Important to note that you should open the command window using ‘run as’.  So in XP, browse to Start >> Programs >> Accessories and then right click ‘command prompt’ and ‘run as’ with elevated privileges.  You’ll need to be able to view the group you’re querying.  I used my own user since I’m a domain admin…you get the idea.  Once you have the command prompt, cd to Desktop so the text file will be easy to find.  Then initiate the following command:

dsquery group -name GroupName |dsget group -members |dsget user -display >memberlist.txt

Substitute for GroupName and put in the group you’re looking for.  Hopefully this helps out.

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